Recommendation 4 — price per registered bond

Never charge per seat.

If you licence this to other originators, a subscription caps your income at exactly the moment the product starts working. Move the sliders to whatever you think a real brokerage looks like and watch what each model does. The argument is not that per-registration earns more at every volume — it is that it earns more precisely where you want to be.

One brokerage

Change anything. Both models recalculate.

Consultants

Bonds registered per consultant per month

Average bond registered

Origination fee the brokerage earns

Your price per seat per month

Your share of each registration

The same brokerage over five years

As they grow into the product.

Why this model is available to you and not to most software companies

You can only charge per registered bond because your own system is what records the registration — the commission ledger already tracks every registration, the bank's payment against it and the date. There is no trust problem and no audit to negotiate. A generic SaaS vendor cannot price this way because they have no idea whether their customer closed anything. That is a structural advantage and it is worth more than the pricing itself.

What is genuinely worse about it, and you should say so first

Your revenue becomes their revenue. A bad quarter for the brokerage is a bad quarter for you, and you have no floor. It is lumpy. Registrations cluster and December is dead; a subscription is smooth and a lender looking at your own books prefers smooth. It is harder to sell to a finance director, who wants a line item, though it is much easier to sell to a principal, who only pays when they have been paid.

The usual answer is a small floor plus the share — a few hundred rand a seat to cover hosting, and the share on top. You keep most of the upside and you stop funding a brokerage that has gone quiet. Set the seat price low and the share high above and you can see that shape.

One thing to decide before you ever quote it: a share of the gross origination fee or of what the brokerage actually receives. They are not the same — banks pay late and occasionally short, and your own commission ledger already distinguishes billed from received for exactly this reason. Charging on gross means billing them for money they have not been paid. Charge on received.

Prototype. Every figure here moves with the sliders and none of it is a quote. Share percentages are of the gross origination fee for illustration; the note above argues you should charge on amounts received. VAT is excluded throughout. Whether a share-of-commission arrangement has any regulatory consequence for an NCR-registered originator is a question for your attorney, not for this page.